JULIUS

JULIUS is a Tokyo avant-garde fashion label founded by Tatsuro Horikawa in 2001. Its origins precede the conventional fashion business that later made the name internationally visible. Horikawa had spent the 1990s inside Tokyo’s underground techno and rave culture, working with graphics, graffiti and live video projections; Third Stone Co., Ltd. was established in 1996 as the corporate structure around this visual practice, followed by the graphic clothing label NUKE in 1997. When NUKE ended in 2001, JULIUS began as a broader art project built from clothing, video, graphics and music in equal measure. That history explains why sound, moving image, typography and spatial presentation have remained integral to the label long after garments became its principal commercial output.

The fashion house took shape in stages. The JULIUS TOKYO STORE opened in Ebisu in 2003, giving the project a permanent physical base and increasing the need for continuous clothing production. A formal seasonal line followed in 2004, with the Spring/Summer 2005 Tokyo Collection show establishing JULIUS inside the runway calendar. The early clothing vocabulary combined engineered drape, distressed leather, military utility, long asymmetrical proportions and a severe black-and-grey palette. Gas-mask cargo trousers, heavy footwear and protective outerwear emerged as recurring forms, while Horikawa treated distortion and layering as a physical language of pressure, damage and urban survival.

International expansion began with a Paris market presence in 2008 and consolidated with the Spring/Summer 2009 season, when JULIUS entered the Paris men’s runway system. The years that followed pushed the established codes through industrial, digital, geometric and spiritual registers. Autumn/Winter 2010 [goth_ik;] sharpened the collision of rigid tailoring and engulfing drape; Spring/Summer 2014 “Ghost” translated the body into a black-and-white urban geometry; Spring/Summer 2016 [sefiroth;] turned towards Kabbalistic and shamanic references; and Spring/Summer 2017 [knives;], developed with Karl O’Connor and Downwards Records, fused a Paris fashion presentation with live industrial sound. The result was a fashion identity rooted in repetition of core forms but resistant to a single decorative theme.

Third Stone also used adjacent labels and lines to separate functions that did not belong cleanly inside the mainline. JULIUS MA began in 2008 as a dress line for sharper tailoring and later continued independently as MA_JULIUS before ending after Autumn/Winter 2015. NILøS arrived in the mid-2010s as a separate sister label with Yuji Takahashi directing its concept and Horikawa designing in discussion with him; its last verified collection in the supplied research is Autumn/Winter 2022–23, and current activity remains unconfirmed. Inside JULIUS itself, PERMANENT_JULIUS has operated since Fall/Winter 2020 as a standing archive line that revisits established products independently of the main seasonal theme.

The contemporary label remains active under Third Stone in Tokyo. Its current structure combines the biannual JULIUS mainline, recurring Pre-Spring and Pre-Fall releases, PERMANENT_JULIUS archive deliveries and selected jewellery or cultural collaborations through the official retail platform. In 2026 the brand was selling Spring/Summer 2026 [mantra;], Pre-Fall 2026 and initial Fall/Winter 2026 [VALIS;] stock, while Spring/Summer 2027 [liminal;] had already been released as a complete lookbook. JULIUS_7 remains a historic styling and naming variant of the same label, not a separate brand.

Horikawa’s design language begins with an unusually specific understanding of black. It is not simply a house colour or a shorthand for subculture. His interviews connect black with madness, grief, Zen thought and the shadowed emotional states that shaped his early visual work; grey carries an associated sense of pain. This psychological use of monochrome developed alongside the industrial environment of Tokyo techno, cyberpunk fiction and cinema, and Horikawa’s encounters with Tibetan monastic culture. The result is a palette that functions as atmosphere and structure before it functions as styling.

The body is repeatedly altered through proportion. JULIUS can compress it with narrow leather trousers and protective tailoring, then obscure it beneath long jersey panels, deep drop-crotches, wrapped layers and asymmetric volume. Draping rarely seeks classical softness. Fabric is twisted, stretched or allowed to fall as if it has been subjected to wear, impact or environmental stress, while military pockets, harness-like straps and dense closures introduce a utilitarian counterweight. Heavy boots and leather accessories anchor the elongated silhouettes and make the clothing read as a complete system instead of a sequence of isolated garments.

Material choice reinforces this tension between protection and erosion. Leather, coated cloth, washed denim, dense jersey, mesh, nylon and technical fabrics recur across the archive, but their role changes with each collection. Some seasons build armour; others expose the body through thin layers or distressed surfaces. Horikawa’s strongest work does not depend on novelty of category. Familiar cargo trousers, leather jackets and long tops are repeatedly recalibrated through pattern, finish, scale and context, allowing the same archetype to move from post-apocalyptic utility to ritual clothing, club uniform or stripped-back archive piece.

Sound and image are part of the design method. JULIUS began with video, graphics and music beside clothing, and the later runway history repeatedly returns to that foundation. The collaboration with Downwards Records for [knives;], Sharna Osborne’s moving image for [ISDN;], Shapednoise and Salvatore Caputo’s work around [DIVIDED;], and Gota Yonekura’s film for [afangar;] show Horikawa using collaborators to alter the emotional conditions in which clothes are encountered. These contributions are credited as authorship within the presentation while the garment design remains Horikawa’s.

The current collection structure has made this continuity more explicit. PERMANENT_JULIUS extracts established garments from the pressure to embody a new seasonal theme, while Pre-Spring and Pre-Fall releases sit alongside the mainline without displacing it. Archive does not mean stasis: recurrent gas-mask cargos, leather pieces and elongated tops can be rebuilt with different fabrication, finish or proportion. JULIUS therefore operates through persistence and mutation, with a recognisable grammar that can absorb cyberpunk, mysticism, industrial music, contemporary art and popular-media collaborations without losing the physical logic of the clothes.